 Hello, everybody. I have a bit of a cold, so I apologize in advance for any sniffing. So, yes, my name is Nico Schouten, I work for Metabolic, and I will first very briefly introduce who Metabolic is, what we do and why we do it, and then how we do it. And then in the end, I will discuss two case studies of where we've actually implemented our way of working. So first, who are we? Metabolic is a consulting and ventures building firm based in Amsterdam. We are around 40 people from a very multidisciplinary background, and our goal is to transition the world's economy towards a sustainable state. And we do that in three ways. So we have the Metabolic ecosystem, one part is the consulting branch, one part is the ventures branch and one part is the think tank. And what we do in these different branches, I will shortly discuss now. So in the consulting branch, we provide insights to municipalities, governments and companies on how the material flows are actually flowing throughout their entire process and where they can best intervene. And then gaining knowledge from our consulting, we implemented knowledge into our ventures and think tank branches. The ventures is actually our own startup factory where we take the knowledge that we feel is lacking in the world and implement it into new companies. An example is Spectral, which is a company focusing on smart energy grids where people can exchange energy via blockchain technology. And the other one is the think tank where we actually do in-depth research together with knowledge institutes and our main goal of the think tank is to connect, investigate and to design. Working with also like generating knowledge which we feel is lacking within the circular world at the moment. So why are we doing this? I will go through this really briefly because of the feeling there are a lot of experts at this table but we live in exponential times. Over the past few decades, the amount of consumption materials has been growing exponentially and as you can see it's not just population or the amount of materials we consume but also the amount of CO2 we emit. And having this exponential growth curve means that we actually can reach tipping points and these tipping points means that at a certain point we have consumed so much that the current ecosystem is no longer usable or it can no longer be used in the same way as we are used to. And to assess these tipping points we use the planetary boundaries which actually are nine boundaries which you can pass and then create the tipping point to create this system which is no longer sustainable or usable. So how it works, the center, in the green area you're actually very good in the go. But then when you come between the orange and the red line you are reaching the tipping point. So you can come close to this problem where you have disrupted the ecosystem that you're living in. So for instance, we have the climate change and we've all heard the 1.5, the 1.2 degrees Celsius rise. So if we were to reach those 1.2 degrees we would actually reach the red boundary and then cross it which would mean that the ecosystem as we know it no longer works. And trying to assess all these different parameters on a constant basis with all the interventions and sustainability we propose. Sustainability intervention we propose. We try to make sure that we can actually curve those growth curves down and make sure that the ecosystem as we know it can be used on a more continuous basis. And we think that the circular economy is a method or a system we can use to actually get back within these planetary boundaries and grow the curve. So we see the circular economy not as a goal, but as a means. And to make sure that we keep within the planetary boundaries we have derived our own system of the seven pillars of the circular economy. Because for us the circular economy means not just material flows but also focusing on energy and water and biodiversity. Because if we were to just focus on material but with recycling or the closing of material loops you would use so much more energy or so much more water then we're not really building towards this more sustainable future. The same with biodiversity and what we think is also very important because we're talking about economy so also about people is that we think also about human culture, health and value beyond financial to make sure that with every step we take we don't forget the people living in our urban metabolistic cities. So why do we focus on cities? We believe that cities are a huge leverage point. So globally only 3% of all the land services occupied by cities but they are responsible for 75% of all our material consumption and responsible for between 60 and 80% of all CO2 greenhouse emissions. So if we can tackle cities then we've tackled such a big part of the problem that we are almost there. So to start thinking about the economy we need to transform our cities we need to redesign our cities and we need to think differently about how we plan our cities. But how do you translate all these goals into very clear actions and that's what we've been focusing on over the past seven years as a company with our own methodology. We like to use a four step approach. So we start by where are we now having the current state analysis of a city then going to where do we want to go as a city? So what's the goal? What's the point on the horizon we want to work towards? Then how do we get there? What interventions can we use to actually take the first steps? And then once we have the interventions we need to start taking action. So how can we create business cases for local businesses but also for municipalities to get started on this transition? And we do these type of assessments through all layers of the city so all the way from buildings to regional to the regional scale. So going a bit more in depth into this process when we start with the current state analysis it can look something like this. This is a material flow analysis we did for Rotterdam where on the left we can see all the flows that go into the city. So the energy, the food, the consumption, the building material, the health, the medicines and then what's coming out of the city. So all the water, the mineral waste, the building waste. But what we think is most important is to see where this waste is actually going. So what's happening with the waste? So it can be recycled or it can be incinerated. And then when we look at these material flows we can also take it one step further. This is where a project we did in Charlotte in the United States where you can actually see all the waste that has a very high landfill capacity so that a lot of the waste is actually being put into the ground. We can also make spatial MFAs to see where within a city several material sources can be found and doing it this way you can start thinking about making decentralized building hubs to actually close the material loops on a more decentralized scale. And having a look at the supply and demand. So this is a scan we did based on the building calendar for a city in the Netherlands where you could see for each year the amount of materials that would be needed to go into the city to build all the new materials and all the materials that would be released due to the construction projects. So in this way we create very clear guidelines for all the city officials to make sure that if they want to have completely circular buildings or if they want to build with just waste material they will need to find a different source because they don't have enough within their own ecosystem. Another project we are working on is the repair project it's together with the AMS Institute in the TU Delft which focuses on bio-based material flows within the metropolitan region of Amsterdam. And this is an interactive chart which real life shows how material flows go through the city go in and out and within the city so that if you want to start a circular business case and you want to start working with this type of materials where they are and how to interact with these material flows then once we've created this current state so you know where you are at this moment we can start thinking about vision and KPIs and these vision and KPIs we do this according to our own seven pillar framework so that you know within every project that you do you're not just thinking of the material but also of the energy and also of the people because we believe that's necessary to create a holistic and more sustainable future and to make all these interventions measurable we work with key performance indicators so that with every decision that you make you don't just have a good feeling about it but you can also really measure the impact of the decisions you make and also how these decisions and interventions contribute to your overall goal so your vision in the long run and this is another example and then once you know these key performance indicators and the point on the horizon where you want to go we can start thinking about interventions and what we think is really important is that these interventions are matched to the amount of material you have but also the type of material and the scale that you're working on different interventions work for the spatial level or the spatial planning or for the built environment or even the building level and also within a city it's important to look at typologies and the type of people there because maybe in a very urbanized dense city center the same type of intervention doesn't work as more on the borders of the city and what is of course most interesting is to see how the different needs of these people can maybe link with each other so how the city center can deliver to the more urban rural part and vice versa and then of course the idea that different flows require different scales so it might be possible to have a grey water system within your own home but if you want to start recycling metal packaging it's maybe not even enough to work with the Netherlands as a whole so that's something we also keep in mind to make sure that the interventions you do actually fit the process or the project that you're working on and then we start looking at the impact assessment to make sure that with every intervention that you do you work towards the goal as effective and price efficient as possible so for instance this is a project we did in America again where we have the potential revenue versus the amount of material that's going to land fill now versus the size of the bubble which is the amount of jobs you can create so there you can see plastic a lot of jobs can be created a lot of revenue can be created but on an overall material scale it's not the most so having insight in these key performance indicators gives city officials the possibility to make the decisions that suited to their project and then from that onwards you start working on the business cases we do this always with local stakeholders to make sure that the people who are working there and who will need to take on this business case can play a vital role within this project and in the end we also try to calculate how this business case can actually land and what the revenue will be created for the local context so that's a lot of information and I will try to illustrate it a bit more clearly on two case studies that we've actually done the first one is the Covel which is a polluted piece of land within the city of Amsterdam it used to be a shipyard then in 2006 the municipality 2008, sorry wrote out a competition for people to actually interact with this piece of land and create a sustainable and circular clean-tech playground so we together with two other companies enrolled and we actually won this tender and what we did is we created a with a lot of old houseboats we created a we call it a vertical office space but also a cafeteria where people can actually experience sustainability and circularity and we did a lot of research here on how the floats could work within this plot but also going out from the plot and how this place could be as self-sufficient as possible so we worked with a lot of houseboats which we bought and retrofitted and put on land and now we organize a lot of events there where people who may not be as known with circularity or experience it on a daily level can go and see what it means to live in a more circular neighborhood and experience what it means working with local material flows from the knowledge we gained here we started looking at the surrounding area so the cave was here but then around it is Bayekslotterham which is an area in the north of Amsterdam which is being redeveloped and we worked with a lot of other parties to write a circular manifesto for this piece of Amsterdam because the city of Amsterdam had the ambitions to make one of the most circular sustainable areas of the Netherlands here so taking knowledge we gained from the coval we upscaled it towards this more area development and we worked on a manifest where we gave guidelines for the new people working and living in this area on how circularity should look and how they can incorporate it into their business model from this manifesto we also worked on another development in Bayekslotterham it's the most sustainable floating community in Europe which is actually a lot of houseboats where we went to a very iterative design process together with architects and residents to see how we can create and design such a sustainable and floating community and from this building process and actually this tendering process we worked on a tendering document for the municipality of Amsterdam so that now every time they do a new building project they have guidelines on how they can actually tender their ground and have circular tendering guidelines I think this is a very nice example of how a very small project on a very local scale generated knowledge which through a very long process could be scaled up to a city level and now has a very high impact on how the city of Amsterdam actually expresses their goals towards the future and then another project we just finished I already mentioned it quite a few times is circular charlotte charlotte is a city in the United States and what we did there is we looked at all the material waste coming from the city so just the waste going out and what we see is that quite a lot of the waste is plastic and almost all the waste is currently being land filled and of course that's really a shame if we're thinking about waste from a circular perspective so what we did there is we looked at all these material flows and at the value creation and the possible renovues that revenues that could be created with these materials and we did stakeholder workshops and with any stakeholder workshops we created five business cases where we calculated how and what the municipality would have to do to actually implement these business cases so for instance one is a concrete recycling chain because in the next few years a lot of the material of the pavements within the city were to be renovated so we said well if you invest in this now you can create a lot of jobs and you have a very vital role in the ecosystem not just of your city but also of building processes around it another one was about upcycling food because now a lot of the food was being composted but actually a lot more high value solutions could be found for this another one was about material innovation and how the municipality could stimulate local entrepreneurs with this material innovation hub and especially this last one I think is really nice because this is the barn it's an existing barn within Charlotte where we're working on now together with the municipality and architects to create this ecosystem where local entrepreneurs can come learn about ecosystems learn about material innovation but also invite citizens to experience what circularity means and how they can interact with it in their own lives and from all these five business cases all these five business cases are actually currently being implemented which means that we can deviate 150,000 tons of waste on a yearly basis in the city and generate a huge amount of jobs so that the city can actually boost their own local economy thank you